Previews

UNLIMITED: SaGa

Square's been cooking up a brand-new entry in one of its longest-running RPG series, set to debut on the PS2 this summer. It's a series that's been around since the 8-bit days; no, silly, it's not Final Fantasy, but SaGa, FF's more left-of-center cousin. Barring the series' three SNES incarnations, the lion's share of SaGa games have been released in the U.S. The latest game looks likely to be the most off-kilter entry in this decidedly unusual series.

Lookin' Sketchy

As the game begins, the first thing you'll see is a lavish-looking CG intro using the much-ballyhooed (by Square, anyway) "Sketch Motion" animation system that was pioneered by Adobe, the creators of many extremely advanced graphical tools for computers, like Photoshop. In reality, Sketch Motion looks like an extremely well-defined, textured brand of cell shading, not dissimilar to the graphics found in Dark Cloud 2.

What you get when you actually start the game, though, is high-resolution 2D sprites, "Sketch Motion" or not. The game's unusual in that you have seven main characters to choose from at the outset of the game. Well, unusual for most RPGs, but not the SaGa series -- as anyone who played Frontier SaGa for the PlayStation could tell you. In the demo we were shown by Square, the character picked was a plucky young lad by the name of Ventus.

Going Postal

Ventus' brother was a mail carrier; yes, the first RPG where you play as a postal worker has arrived, as Ventus joins the mail service to discover how his brother lost his life. Mailmen and mail have long been important to the genre; it's time they got their due. Anyway, once you pick him, you'll see a long-winded text cutscene with large portraits of the characters involved; there's no 3D graphics and very little animation, but the game's unique style sets the tone through judicious use of painterly 2D artwork. There are occasional voice events in and out of battle, and Square has confirmed with us that they'll be dubbing them for the U.S. release of the game.

It's hard to say which game system is the most peculiar; all of them look to have been tweaked and changed into a new shape by the game's development team. Take the dungeon exploration, for example: you won't actually move manually, but instead explore what seems most like an electronic board game in its implementation, with segmented squares and branching pathways you move to one at a time.

Advanced Dungeons & Drawings

Lightning strikes down on these crab-like monsters.

Dungeons contain hidden traps that you have a chance to defeat by using the game's ring menu system; if you time your button press to the right icon, you're safe. Some squares have places you can hide from enemies or treasure chests. Unlike other games, your capability to open a treasure chest is based on your skills. While exploring we encountered a box that required a specific Level 11 attack skill to open, for example. What's ahead of you is labeled with question marks. Once you move to that square, its contents are revealed -- if you decide to move back, you'll know what's up. Some squares contain enemies, of course, which will launch you into a battle.